IEEE 802.11ax is a type of wireless local area network (WLAN) in the IEEE 802.11 set of types of WLANs. It is designed to improve overall spectral efficiency, especially in dense deployment scenarios. In particular, in addition to utilizing multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO), 802.11ax introduces orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) to improve overall spectral efficiency, and higher order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) support (such as 1024-QAM) for increased throughput, specifically due to more efficient spectrum utilization.
Using 802.11ax, however, can be problematic for locationing services (that is, technology that allows for the pinpointing of a wireless client device's location within a given space based on wireless signals). In particular, the division of bandwidth for OFDMA resource unit allocation can detrimentally affect location accuracy because narrow bandwidths are more susceptible to variations in the frequency selective channel than the entire bandwidth. Unfortunately, selecting more resource units is not optimal as it reduces the capacity of the network, countering the benefits of OFDMA in the first place.